Never-Fail Blake Part 1

Never-Fail Blake.

by Arthur Stringer.

I

Blake, the Second Deputy, raised his gloomy hound's eyes as the door opened and a woman stepped in. Then he dropped them again.

"h.e.l.lo, Elsie!" he said, without looking at her.

The woman stood a moment staring at him. Then she advanced thoughtfully toward his table desk.

"h.e.l.lo, Jim!" she answered, as she sank into the empty chair at the desk end. The rustling of silk suddenly ceased. An aphrodisiac odor of ambergris crept through the Deputy-Commissioner's office.

The woman looped up her veil, festooning it about the undulatory roll of her hat brim. Blake continued his solemnly preoccupied study of the desk top.

"You sent for me," the woman finally said. It was more a reminder than a question. And the voice, for all its quietness, carried no sense of timidity. The woman's pale face, where the undulating hat brim left the shadowy eyes still more shadowy, seemed fortified with a calm sense of power. It was something more than a dormant consciousness of beauty, though the knowledge that men would turn back to a face so wistful as hers, and their judgment could be dulled by a smile so narcotizing, had not a little to do with the woman's achieved serenity.

There was nothing outwardly sinister about her. This fact had always left her doubly dangerous as a law-breaker.

Blake himself, for all his dewlap and his two hundred pounds of lethargic beefiness, felt a vague and inward stirring as he finally lifted his head and looked at her. He looked into the shadowy eyes under the level brows. He could see, as he had seen before, that they were exceptional eyes, with iris rings of deep gray about the ever-widening and ever-narrowing pupils which varied with varying thought, as though set too close to the brain that controlled them. So dominating was this pupil that sometimes the whole eye looked violet, and sometimes green, according to the light.

Then his glance strayed to the woman's mouth, where the upper lip curved outward, from the base of the straight nose, giving her at first glance the appearance of pouting. Yet the heavier underlip, soft and wilful, contradicted this impression of peevishness, deepened it into one of Ishmael-like rebellion.

Then Blake looked at the woman's hair. It was abundant and nut-brown, and artfully and scrupulously interwoven and twisted together. It seemed to stand the solitary pride of a life claiming few things of which to be proud. Blake remembered how that wealth of nut-brown hair was daily plaited and treasured and coiled and cared for, the meticulous attentiveness with which morning by morning its hip-reaching abundance was braided and twisted and built up about the small head, an intricate structure of soft wonder which midnight must ever see again in ruins, just as the next morning would find idly laborious fingers rebuilding its ephemeral glories. This rebuilding was done thoughtfully and calmly, as though it were a religious rite, as though it were a sacrificial devotion to an ideal in a life tragically forlorn of beauty.

He remembered, too, the day when he had first seen her. That was at the time of "The Sick Millionaire" case, when he had first learned of her a.s.sociation with Binhart. She had posed at the Waldorf as a trained nurse, in that case, and had met him and held him off and outwitted him at every turn. Then he had decided on his "plant." To effect this he had whisked a young Italian with a lacerated thumb up from the City Hospital and sent him in to her as an injured elevator-boy looking for first-aid treatment. One glimpse of her work on that thumb showed her to be betrayingly ignorant of both figure-of-eight and spica bandaging, and Blake, finally satisfied as to the imposture, carried on his investigation, showed "Doctor Callahan"

to be Connie Binhart, the con-man and bank thief, and sent the two adventurers scurrying away to shelter.

He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimson of the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from Paris, involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond robbery. The despatches had given his office very little to work on, and she had smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy threats. But as she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her girlishly frail body so arrogantly well gowned, she had in some way touched his lethargic imagination. She showed herself to be of finer and keener fiber than the sordid demireps with whom he had to do.

s.h.i.+mmering and saucy and debonair as a polo pony, she had seemed a departure from type, something above the meretricious termagants round whom he so often had to weave his accusatory webs of evidence.

Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involved in the Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon, from whom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put a bullet through his head rather than go home disgraced, and she had straightway been brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and the production of her dupe's letters, Sheldon's death had been looked upon as a murder.

Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner, alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three long hours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flas.h.i.+ng and snake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of his inhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. He had bulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness. He had third-degreed her into cowering and trembling indignation, into hectic mental uncertainties. Then, with the fatigue point well pa.s.sed, he had marshaled the last of his own animal strength and essayed the final blasphemous Vesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervous breakdown, the ultimate collapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering, loose-lipped, abandoned weeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forward and caught at his arm and clung to it, as though it were her last earthly pillar of support. Her huge plaited ropes of hair had fallen down, thick brown ropes longer than his own arms, and he, breathing hard, had sat back and watched them as she wept.

But Blake was neither a.n.a.lytical nor introspective. How it came about he never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate fas.h.i.+on, that this scene of theirs, that this official a.s.sault and surrender, was in some way a.s.sociated with the climacteric transports of camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers touched on in rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the final emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to the first aggressive tides of pa.s.sion. What it was based on, what it arose from, he could not say. But in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquest he had watched her abandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And as he watched, a vague and troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputter along his limbs, and fired something dormant and dangerous in the great hulk of a body which had never before been stirred by its explosion of emotion. It was not pity, he knew; for pity was something quite foreign to his nature. Yet as she lay back, limp and forlorn against his shoulder, sobbing weakly out that she wanted to be a good woman, that she could be honest if they would only give her a chance, he felt that thus to hold her, to s.h.i.+eld her, was something desirable.

She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer down over hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as his heavy lips had closed on hers that were still wet and salty with tears.

When she had left the office, at the end of that strange hour, she had gone with the promise of his protection.

The sobering light of day, with its cynic relapse to actualities, might have left that promise a worthless one, had not the prompt evidence of Sheldon's suicide come to hand. This made Blake's task easier than he had expected. The movement against Elsie Verriner was "smothered" at Headquarters. Two days later she met Blake by appointment. That day, for the first time in his life, he gave flowers to a woman.

Two weeks later he startled her with the declaration that he wanted to marry her. He did n't care about her past. She 'd been dragged into the things she 'd done without understanding them, at first, and she 'd kept on because there 'd been no one to help her away from them. He knew he could do it. She had a fine streak in her, and he wanted to bring it out!

A little frightened, she tried to explain that she was not the marrying kind. Then, brick-red and bull-necked, he tried to tell her in his groping Celtic way that he wanted children, that she meant a lot to him, that he was going to try to make her the happiest woman south of Harlem.

This had brought into her face a quick and dangerous light which he found hard to explain. He could see that she was flattered by what he had said, that his words had made her waywardly happy, that for a moment, in fact, she had been swept off her feet.

Then dark afterthought interposed. It crept like a cloud across her abandoned face. It brought about a change so prompt that it disturbed the Second Deputy.

"You 're--you 're not tied up already, are you?" he had hesitatingly demanded. "You 're not married?"

"No, I 'm not tied up!" she had promptly and fiercely responded. "My life 's my own--my own!"

"Then why can't you marry me?" the practical-minded man had asked.

"I could!" she had retorted, with the same fierceness as before. Then she had stood looking at him out of wistful and unhappy eyes. "I could--if you only understood, if you could only help me the way I want to be helped!"

She had clung to his arm with a tragic forlornness that seemed to leave her very wan and helpless. And he had found it ineffably sweet to enfold that warm ma.s.s of wan helplessness in his own virile strength.

She asked for time, and he was glad to consent to the delay, so long as it did not keep him from seeing her. In matters of the emotions he was still as uninitiated as a child. He found himself a little dazed by the seemingly accidental tenderness, by the promises of devotion, in which she proved so lavish. Morning by jocund morning he built up his airy dreams, as carefully as she built up her nut-brown plaits. He grew heavily light-headed with his plans for the future. When she pleaded with him never to leave her, never to trust her too much, he patted her thin cheek and asked when she was going to name the day.

From that finality she still edged away, as though her happiness itself were only experimental, as though she expected the blue sky above them to deliver itself of a bolt.

But by this time she had become a habit with him. He liked her even in her moodiest moments. When, one day, she suggested that they go away together, anywhere so long as it was away, he merely laughed at her childishness.

It was, in fact, Blake himself who went away. After nine weeks of alternating suspense and happiness that seemed nine weeks of inebriation to him, he was called out of the city to complete the investigation on a series of iron-workers' dynamite outrages. Daily he wrote or wired back to her. But he was kept away longer than he had expected. When he returned to New York she was no longer there. She had disappeared as completely as though an asphalted avenue had opened and swallowed her up. It was not until the following winter that he learned she was again with Connie Binhart, in southern Europe.

He had known his one belated love affair. It had left no scar, he claimed, because it had made no wound. Binhart, he consoled himself, had held the woman in his power: there had been no defeat because there had been no actual conquest. And now he could face her without an eye-blink of conscious embarra.s.sment. Yet it was good to remember that Connie Binhart was going to be ground in the wheels of the law, and ground fine, and ground to a finish.

"What did you want me for, Jim?" the woman was again asking him. She spoke with an intimate directness, and yet in her att.i.tude were subtle reservations, a consciousness of the thin ice on which they both stood.

Each saw, only too plainly, the need for great care, in every step. In each lay the power to uncover, at a hand's turn, old mistakes that were best unremembered. Yet there was a certain suave audacity about the woman. She was not really afraid of Blake, and the Second Deputy had to recognize that fact. This self-a.s.surance of hers he attributed to the recollection that she had once brought about his personal subjugation, "got his goat," as he had phrased it. She, woman-like, would never forget it.

"There 's a man I want. And Schmittenberg tells me you know where he is." Blake, as he spoke, continued to look heavily down at his desk top.

"Yes?" she answered cautiously, watching herself as carefully as an actress with a role to sustain, a role in which she could never quite letter-perfect.

"It's Connie Binhart," cut out the Second Deputy.

He could see discretion drop like a curtain across her watching face.

"Connie Binhart!" she temporized. Blake, as his heavy side glance slewed about to her, prided himself on the fact that he could see through her pretenses. At any other time he would have thrown open the flood-gates of that ever-inundating anger of his and swept away all such obliquities.

"I guess," he went on with slow patience "we know him best round here as Charles Blanchard."

"Blanchard?" she echoed.

"Yes, Blanchard, the Blanchard we 've been looking for, for seven months now, the Blanchard who chloroformed Ezra Newcomb and carried off a hundred and eighteen thousand dollars."

"Newcomb?" again meditated the woman.

"The Blanchard who shot down the bank detective in Newcomb's room when the rest of the bank was listening to a German band playing in the side street, a band hired for the occasion."

"When was that?" demanded the woman.

"That was last October," he answered with a sing-song weariness suggestive of impatience at such supererogative explanations.

"I was at Monte Carlo all last autumn," was the woman's quick retort.

Blake moved his heavy body, as though to shoulder away any claim as to her complicity.